Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 21, 2010

Gmail Improves "Undo Send"

Gmail has a very useful Labs feature called "undo send" that lets you "unsend" a message immediately after sending it. If you accidentally clicked on the "Send" button or you realize that you forgot to attach an important file, you have a few seconds to click on "undo" and continue to edit the message.

@anon August 21, 2010 5:20 PM: Scheduled emails would be sent a specific time, even if you're not present to click send.@Justin: They improved it by increasing the max time to undo.---Scheduled send would be great, but it definitely serves a different (sometimes-overlapping) purpose than Undo Send.---Question: Where do you change the time? I don't see the option in my Labs.

Now I wish they can update the reply function to do the same when you forgot to reply all after you sent, or better confirming that you sent to one recipient only when more than one is in the recipient list.

I like this "improvement" I must say. But why make it a lab feature that has to be turned on and then the associated setting goes under the general tab? Am I the only one who thinks this is counter intuitive?

What's old is new again.Eudora had scheduled send (delayed mail) over 10 years ago. I remember using it on my OS 8 Powermacs back then.Before Outlook, before webmail.Good to see its finally showing up somewhere useful and popular, like gmail.

I wouldn't want scheduling email a standard feature just now, because I use it to send work emails late at night when I am deep asleep. If it becomes a standard gmail feature my boss might see through what I am doing.

well, "undo send" is the thing we should do sometimes and to say the truth i just cant imagine working with mail without this pretty good feature. so now we have send cancellation period selection: 5, 10, 20 and 30 seconds. i think the next step of feature improving is to allow custom selection between given values i.e. 5,6,7...30

Scheduled send would be good. Sometimes I'd like to send work-related emails in the middle of the night, but I don't want to be known as someone who sends work-related emails in the middle of the night. Queueing them up to send at, oh, 9:30am, would be great.

I wish they made it so that the undo option stays visible for those 20 secs or so even if you move to another message or spam box or somewhere else. Basically its usually a waste of time to make it more than 10 seconds because in that time you'd already click somewhere else and lose the option to undo. I wish it stayed there till the end of the countdown.

omg biiig WHOOP. It's been in labs for YEARS. It let you say how long you want. 5-10-20 secs. 20 secs the most. So 30 would be "new."

I have it set on the max. Do I undo a lot of emails? Hardly. Gets ű b e r annoying if you have a person on the phone and you keep going "did you get it yet?" If anything, it makes me even m o r e careless about hitting the send button. ... and with my p.o.s. laptop, it's too late to undo, by the time I f i n d the "undo" button.

Please if while you are seeing the countdown you could see a preview of your message it would be a LOT more useful. In those 5-10-30 seconds with some extra adrenalin you could fast read for a last time the message and if you manage to detect a typo/something missing you could undo it.

Other than that Gmail Labs should add an option to preview messages just like in any common forum — good practice, and it would save a lot of typos for it´s users ;)

actually, i think it would help me more, if gmail would allow us to increase this undo time till the other person has read the message(for replies as well as for new mails).Because if we are sending a very big mail, 30 seconds may not be enough to read it once again and click undo...